Alchemic Cutie joins Indie MegaBooth @ PAX East 2020
We’re excited to announce that Alchemic Cutie is joining the Indie MegaBooth at PAX East 2020! 🙂 Stop by booth 21051 on Saturday 29th February or Sunday 1st March to play our latest demo.
There is an awesome lineup of games at the Indie MegaBooth throughout the show so make sure to stop by each day.
To add more excitement, we’ve made a new trailer just for the show! Check it out below and see all the new features we’ve been working on 🙂
We hope you had a good 2019 and have an even better 2020 🙂 We have a few quick updates today.
Jelly Traits & Abilities
We’ve been working on updates to Jelly traits and have finalised all 32(!) possible traits a Jelly can have.
Every Jelly can have up to 3 traits. Traits can effect things such as digestion speed, stats, breeding and behavior. However, we’ve added some special traits (also known as Abilities) that activate while the player is carrying or holding a Jelly. These include finding hidden items, seeing when wild Jellies will appear and more!
Wild Jelly traits depend on the area, time of day and season so some exploring will be required to find the traits that you want. And if you want a Jelly to have a specific combination of traits, you’ll need to breed some Jellies.
Goodbye Obo
A few weeks ago, a Jelly egg appeared in our Discord server. Everyone helped to take care of the egg and when it hatched, we voted to name the jelly ‘Obo’. Since then, everyone took care of Obo, feeding them tasty treats and playing with them. Obo’s stats resulted with Tummy at level 34, Social at level 30 and Blob at level 29.
But alas, the contraption completed, and Obo has been sent to Wimba Island. And now a new Egg has appeared.
What does this mean? Well, any Jellies raised by our Discord community before launch will end up in-game as special event Jellies that can be caught. A Jelly’s stats effect many things from competitions to breeding to quests so planning how to raise a Jelly is important.
We’re currently preparing for a big game show (more info soon) and focusing on main storyline content which means a lot of writing, scripting and mapping.
It looks like Santa has stopped by Wimba Island early. He left Finn a Jelly egg for Christmas and Finn needs help looking after it. So he’s asked our Discord community to help raise it!
Finn will post updates on the egg every few hours with a guess of when he think it will hatch. We can vote on doing an activity with the egg by clicking on the reactions.
P.S. A special thanks to Haku who helped code this 😊
Development Log #14
Hey there Cutie Club,
After EGX Berlin (and London) we’re finally back into development and already have some updates to share 🙂
Weather System
We’ve added a weather system into the game. Depending on the time of year, Wimba Island can be prone to different types of weather. On top of that, different types of weather will effect Jellies in different ways.
New dialogue box (again)
At EGX Berlin, we noticed players weren’t realizing that there was a scrollbox in the dialogue UI and that more options were available. Additionally, we realised the old UI didn’t work well if two NPCs were talking to each other.
Based on those, we redesigned the dialogue box again to make things more clear. And for dialogue choices, if more choices are available the arrows will bounce to indicate more options can be selected.
EGX Berlin
We had a great time at EGX Berlin, meeting lots of old and new fans of the game! Our booth was always busy and we joined the Let’s Play 4 Charity stream playing the latest beta build. Hopefully we can attend again next year! 🙂
What’s next?
Sebastien and Taylor are working away on building out the last areas of Wimba Island while Stephen and myself are coding some super secret new features…can’t reveal anything just yet 🤐
We're excited to announce that we'll be showing Alchemic Cutie at EGX London and EGX Berlin this year! If you haven't gotten a ticket yet, there's still time...but move fast, they're starting to run low! :)
We've also got a new trailer just for EGX. Check it out below!
[previewyoutube="jVkVHldV0zs;full"]
Development Log #13
Hey there Cutie Club,
We have some updates to share today!
Environment Interaction
First off, we've been working on introducing alchemy to the environment to bring more fun to the game world. Every season will have different environment objects to play your flute on and find crystals.
New Flute Mechanics
Speaking of flute playing, we've completely revamped the flute mechanics.
To tie in with progressing to the different areas of Wimba Island, we've also added a progression system to the player's flute. The player has a limited number of transmutations shown in the top-right of the HUD. The flute will recharge throughout the day, or, if you want to completely recharge your flute, you can return home and sleep.
As the game progresses, you'll activate shrines in the game world which will expand your flute meter allowing you to perform more transmutations each day.
A homely home
Sebastien has been working on the tileset for interiors and has built out the player's home (left) and the grandparent's home (right). They look so cosy! :)
What's next?
As mentioned on our Jellycast, we won't be able to attend PAX and Gamescom this year (*sad jelly noises*). However, we are looking into attending a conference later in the year (hint: it may be in the U.K.). We hope to have more news soon :)
Tom has been working away on porting work and will have something cool to share soon. Taylor has been detailing The Plains (no spoilers yet) and has recently begun detailing The Forest part of the island. Stephen and Caoimhe has been working some new features which we'll share in a later blog post ;)
It’s been a while since we’ve recorded a JellyCast so here’s a new cast where we talk about what we’ve been working on. In the video you can also catch a small preview of Wimba Island 😉
And if you’re interested in games programming, Sebastien prompts Tom into a 20 minute detour on programming around halfway through the cast 😛
https://youtu.be/cSIQ4RzXPgE
P.S. If you haven’t signed up to the Cutie Club yet, you can do so here. As always, make sure to follow @alchemiccutie and @CIRCLE_Ent for future updates.
Development Log #12
Hey there Cutie Club,
We’ve been busy the past few months working hard on the game and we have a lot of updates to share today! 🙂
New Logo After a lot of feedback and revisions, we’ve updated the game logo! Our new logo is a lot more readable and 200% cuter. Check it out below! 🙂
A Wholesome Adventure At the end of May myself and Sebastien worked with Talespinners to plan out the full narrative of the game. We have now finalised the story points of the game and are writing the finer details and dialogue. A special thanks to Matt Gibbs and Cash DeCuir for lending us their expertise!
New Team Members We have 4 new members on the cutie team helping us build our wholesome RPG! Augusto Zanellato, Stephen Kelly-Hannon and Caoimhe Tiernan have joined us as programmers for the summer to help build out more gameplay features (more info later!). Taylor Richardson has also joined us as a Level Artist to help us bring Wimba Island to life. Expect a lot of updates in the coming weeks! Also, Caoimhe’s mom baked us an Alchemic Cutie cake which was yummy!
Building Wimba Island Taylor and Sebastien have been hard at work building out the first area of the island. Wimba Island is split into 4 areas; The Plains, The Forest, The Springs and The Mountain. The plains is where your home and Wimba Village are. There’s lots of villagers wandering around, fields to explore and catch jellies. Check out a preview of Wimba Village below!
What’s next? We have a lot of updates and announcements coming soon so we won’t spoil anything yet! However, we would recommend joining our Discord server as there may be something new there soon 😉
We’ve been busy with development and have several updates to share today 🙂
End of Alpha We’ll be closing sign ups to the alpha build on Monday 22nd April. We ended updates to the alpha in March as we started working on the next stage of development. Thank you to everyone who signed up and gave us feedback to improve the game 🙂 If you previously signed up to the alpha, make sure to click the Discord invite link in your invitation and join the server before Monday. We’ll have some surprises for our alpha players on Discord in the future! And if you haven’t signed up yet you can do so here.
Jelly Shrine Sebastien has been working on the design for the Jelly shrine. Unfortunately Jellies get old and die, leaving behind relics. It’s a tradition on Wimba Island to place relics in the local shrine. There’s a rumor that certain relic patterns can perform alchemy at night…
Jelly Ghosts When exploring at night time, keep an eye on out for ghosts…
World Map Sebastien also finished designing the world map that can be found in the player’s notebook. As you discover locations, you can use the map to fast travel. It’s also useful for marking locations you want to remember for later.
What’s next? Tom is still working hard on porting the engine to the Nintendo Switch. Meanwhile, Dale has started composing the overworld music for the game and Sebastien is finishing up additional gameplay assets.
We've been busy since the last update building out Wimba Island. Over 200 Tiled maps will make up the island so we have a lot of work ahead of us!
From rough sketch to Tiled Sebastien started off with a sketch of the island, then split it into images and imported them as image layers in Tiled. The first pass in Tiled was to do a quick fill of the terrain and allow us to see a rough version of the island and remove the image layers so that we could explore the island in-game. Now, we're focusing on building out the village and plains where the game starts.
Without spoiling too much, here's a section of that initial sketch showing where the game starts :)
To put it in perspective, this area is only 1/16th of the entire island. There are many environment types and locations to explore but you'll have to wait for later blog posts to learn find out more! (hey that rhymes!)
What's next? After re-working a lot of the UI to improve readability on the Switch's screen size, Tom is now starting to port the engine. This is going to be a lot of work but hopefully we'll have a build running (in some form) by May :) Sebastien will be continuing on the Tiled maps while also working on new tiles needed for locations around the island.
